freedumb

Futrelle also recently associated MRAs with white supremacy on Sam Seeder’s show. It’s like his thing now. Oh well, demagogues and scaremongers aren’t known for their imagination. As for Marcotte, she’s always made that equation.

I’m not a libertarian, and I realize a lot of the people who listen to this show or who are more comfortable with antifeminism are, but this is where the confusion arises. People like Marcotte jump at the chance to associate criticisms of feminism with right wing quackery because she can saddle antifeminism with all of the right wing’s sins basically. It works.

A lot of people who write antifeminists off and refuse to take them seriously are doing it precisely because they’re not really that invested in gender issues. They care more about poverty, the efficacy of capitalism, the affordability of college, and so on. If Marcotte can link femininsm’s critics to a brand of politics they already oppose, she can keep them from thinking critically about gender and recognizing that feminist politics are entirely inconsistent with the left’s politics generally.

I suspect that this is actually one of the biggest reasons more people don’t take the MRM seriously. It is at least as important as our already natural tendency to defer to women’s imaginary victimhood. They’re not hearing your actual arguments, which you will easily win, but instead are hearing libertarian conspiracy theory, Stefan Molyneux, Lyndon Larouche and various other Goldwater-esque cranks who think the market is God.

For instance, Marcotte calls people who question false rape allegation statistics “rape truthers,” a reference to 911 truthers. The archetypal Fedora Man and supporter of Gamergate is, in their minds, also an “anarcho-capitalist” goldbug who obsesses about the federal reserve and so on.

When libertarians and other right wingers (and yes, libertarians are right wingers) say “freedom,” what their critics hear is “freedom for corporations, landowners, slaveholders, creditors, and people who profit from debt peonage,” they hear “freedom for the strong at the expense of the weak.”

And quite frankly, that is what the libertarian conception of “freedom” amounts to in practice when it is applied to economic policy, so they’re not entirely wrong. It’s what’s known as “freedumb.”

As Cornell West says “freedom for who?” Come at me, motherfuckers.

As I’ve always said, the most devastating criticism of feminism comes from the left, not from the right, because it is only from the left’s vantage point that feminism becomes identifiable as a form of bigotry. It’s pretty easily shown that feminism is identical to racism or the way conservatives think about “the takers,” meaning the poor. It isn’t a stretch to simply imagine the takers as blacks, and that is precisely why racists and conservatives who are not racists can easily agree on the same policy proposals, just as it isn’t a stretch for feminists and their appeasers to imagine that the bad guys, the source of whatever threat in any instance, is men. And feminism’s affinity with reactionary politics is easily identifiable if we’re inclined to think about the way systems make individuals rather than assuming, as much of the right does, that individuals make systems.

If anybody hasn’t read Marcotte’s response to that Aaronson blog post, check it out. It was definitely one of the nails in the coffin of my own feminism.

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§ One Response to freedumb

As long as people don’t unterstand the frame within which their social conflicts are set up – they will always be subjected to someone elses power. The real reason why people are living in bad life circumstances is that they have never learnt to “deal” with people. Live is about power and power is mainly about negotiating. As long as you don’t master the art vor negotiating (getting what you want) you will blame the world. Most people are great in complaining but very bad when it comes to persuing their interests.